Is Life Long or Short?

Life is *&%^$ and then you die... or so they say. Personally I don't believe them :) I look out my window onto my sunny backyard and watch the trees dancing in the breeze, the colorful flowers that are blooming now, and the birds that are zooming to and from the feeders and I know that life is a wonderful thing.
If I lean over and peer down, I can see the deck that Steve and I made with it's table and chairs, grill, and lights - just perfect for entertaining or for cozy and contemplative sitting together - and I know that life is full and good..
Oh, I know, I can hear you say it... Bah, she has all that, she doesn't know anything about a tough life.
Well, yeah, I do. I grew up poor. Oh, as a child I didn't really know I was poor, but I was :) I grew up in an old house in Willoughby, a section of Norfolk, VA that juts out into the bay. It's actually named Willoughby Spit because it was said to have been "spit-up" by a hurricane - the veracity of which is unknown. Nevertheless, the house I grew up in was meant to be a summer cottage back when the "have-gots" came to spend the summers there. My grandfather won the house and the house next door in a poker game. :D Yep, he was a gamblin' man and all the trappings that go with such including alcoholism. Unfortunately, his sister and two of his children shared this afliction with him.
Fortunately, for me at least, my father wasn't one of the two. So at least I got to watch this display from one step back.
My father had had a good job until the war came along. He was a car rep. But automobile manufacturing came to a halt with the war. He tried to enlist but the army fluoroscoped his feet and said he'd had polio and couldn't join up. This was news to him, but they were adamant and he wasn't allowed to enlist. Suddenly he had no job and no idea what to do about it. He apparently tried a number of different things, ran a truck stop for awhile, but nothing worked too well and he and my mother, two sisters and brother moved around for awhile until the family offered to allow him to rent one of the summer cottages for $50.00 a month. This allowed him to get by, at least, so there they stayed.
This house, if house you could call it, had no central heat. It was so poorly constructed that when the wind blew hard the curtains in the kitchen window flapped (and yes the window was down, and locked , and covered with plastic sheeting on the outside!) Needless to say, it was pretty cold in the winter in there. We spent the colder months in the kitchen with all the doors shut and a blanket nailed over the front door. We kept the oven on and the oven door open while we sat at the kitchen table and played cards.
I learned how to play Go Fish and Slap Jack, then Down the River, Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Solitaire, Set Back, Rummy and Gin Rummy. Throw in a little Monopoly and Parcheesi, and you get a pretty good picture of my childhood :) Yes, I was learning to be a card shark, lol. I was a great shuffler and could even do the "bridge" .
I was a bit of a surprise to my folks. My mother was 43 when I was born and apparently they thought they were "past all that", but I had other ideas. So my parents were older. They didn't go to the PTA meetings and such because they'd "already done all that". I was pretty much on my own.
Anyway, you can see where I'm going with this :) I'll continue more later. I have somewhere to be, and little time to get there.....

Life is Short Part Deux :)

Journey into the Unknown

Ok, where was I? Oh yea :)
My siblings were all quite a bit older than me. My oldest sister was 19, my next sister 15 and my brother 8 when I was born. This made "almost" an only child, hehe. By the time I was old enough to bug anyone, my brother was a teenager and my sisters were out of the house.
I grew up with my older sister's kids. I was 3 1/2 years older than her twins, and she had two more children in the two years after that. So I had a large family of "almost siblings" and when I got tired of sharing, I could go home, LOL. She also had another child several years later... someone to watch over and protect :)
I worshipped my brother. He had a friend who lived just a few houses away, and when he'd come over I would stand at the top of the stairs on the porch with my arms crossed and tell him, in no uncertain terms, "go away, Bubba doesn't want to play with you!"
Yes, my brother's name is Bubba. Living in Virginia gives us enough of a Southern twist to call him by that nickname. My Daddy called him Butch. Or sometimes Bubs. Since his real name is Theorore Clyde III, we had to do something :)
More about my childhood later. Suffice it to say I grew up poor but pretty much in the dark about it :) I married after a year in college - much too young if you ask me. I think everyone should be required to finish school and live on their own for at least one year before being allowed to marry... but, again, that's another story...
We had two children when my husband had a better idea and we split up.
Now I was a single Mom. One of my children had Treacher-Collins Syndrome. She was born with a cleft palate and had to have a tracheostomy and a gastrostomy (a tube in the trachea to allow her to breathe without choking and a tube in her tummy so she could be fed). She required a lot of medical care. Click here to see more on Gracie
So now I was a single mom with two children, one with some major problems, and a husband who thought child support was a vile requirement. By the time my youngest was 3 years old, he was over $11,000 in arrears.
To say the least, I learned many ways to stretch a dollar. We ate a lot of eggs - there's a dozen of 'em in there... that makes a lot of meals -- and a lot of macaroni and cheese. I saw too it that my kids had all their veggies too, but it was a hard time. Very hard in more ways than one.
But I learned a lot from my children and most of them were wonderful lessons. They were loving and happy babies; their Dad had no idea what he tossed away.
So, yeah, I know what poor looks and feels like. If you find yourself in that boat, you can choose to let it destroy you or you can grow stronger from it. I certainly had my days when I thought it would drag me down and trample me in the dust, but mostly, I scrimped and worked and somethow made it through.
Excuse me while I go look at those flowers and trees again, I think I've earned the view.
More later.... :)